Like a trusty six shooter, every developer needs a good text editor in their toolbox.

For heavy lifting it’s great to wheel out the IDE (CFEclipse, Dreamweaver, etc) but for those quick edits using an IDE can seem like overkill. A simple text editor is lightweight and designed for doing one thing well – editing text!

There are text editors for every platform, ranging from bare bones command line interfaces to Window’s built in Notepad to elaborate applications like UltraEdit.

A good text editor will offer syntax highlighting, code assist, search and replace, multi-document editing and more. Many support plugins or bundles to further extend their functionality. In this screenshot you can see one of the many text editing menus available in Notepad++.

If you are editing your Ant scripts in Dreamweaver or still using Windows Notepad – check out some of the alternatives!

• UltraEdit (Win)
• Textmate (Mac)
• E – Text Editor (Textmate for Windows)
• Notepad ++ (Win)
• jEdit (Java)
• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors